Brian Yam presents a framework for using LinkedIn Ads efficiently at Paragon. He covers channel fit, account and role targeting, cold-to-hot creative, segmentation, and the metrics that diagnose audience and message fit.
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Decide when LinkedIn is not a fit
“yet uh if your ICP does not spend time on LinkedIn don't you know meet them where they are don't spend money on LinkedIn if they don't uh third if you don't have content your ICP will find Value in uh I'll get into this more later but you probably shouldn't spend too much money on LinkedIn if you don't have content uh fourth if you have a very low ACV if you're a plg product where you're trying to drive signups for you know $100 a year probably not you know not a great Channel fit for you and then if you have less than 5K to spend and try to build confidence in the channel I would say probably not worth”
“from this lens and this kind of ties into targeting so when you build your targeting um framework those segments we just put together that builds up the account or company part of your targeting right so for every campaign you need to figure out what roles are we targeting are we targeting product leaders are we targeting marketing leaders right um that's consistent across all campaigns and then in the middle that's where you decide okay for this campaign am I targeting the cold segment the warm segment the hot segment”
“to really think about okay is it you know they're not convinced that my product is the right solution do they think the problem we solve is not a priority you can start to think ask yourself these questions to inform what you focus your ads on right because they're they're kind of actively buying and so here's just some examples from the left we have our cold ads on the right we have hot and so just to give you example of how we kind of break this apart on the left we're talking about kind of engineering content where Integrations are a small piece of it but it's really just like a very kind of hot”
“verticalized B2B SAS as the example but there's sales software that we could sell to there's marketing software we can sell to there's HR software we can sell to as an example those are all individual segments if you break it down you know this is also a pretty big range of company sizes right and so we think about our tiers in terms of okay are they five 50 to 200 employees are they 200 to 500 employees right these are all different ways of cutting the pie remember your ICP is not your uh not your segment it's your universe so pick your best segment look at your sales”
all right thanks everybody um yeah today I'm going to be talking about LinkedIn ads uh so quick context you know I've taken Paragon from pretty much a couple beta users to now kind of mid seven figures in ARR over the last three years and Linkedin ads has been a huge piece of how we've gone there so I'll share my framework um but for some context on me and my experience so far uh pre Paragon I was running kind of fractional growth for a couple C to series B startups really helping them figure out hey how do we drive leads right whether that's
du paid ads whether that's du outbound email we really understood and dove into their products their ICP to figure out where do we think the highest leverage experiment should be run now at Paragon you know I've joined three years ago since then we've 30X our AR obviously small B to start but still valuable to share um and this year so far I've spent over a million dollars on LinkedIn ads so why are you all here uh well actually before that what is Paragon so Paragon we're in embedded integration platform
essentially developers at SAS companies use Paragon to build Integrations with third- party apps like Salesforce slack uh task management tools you know everybody needs Integrations and so we target developers and product teams uh and even with this highly technical audience LinkedIn ADS works for us but you're probably here because you hear this right LinkedIn ads is too expensive and I used to think this too um I used to run oh some of the animations are off but uh I used to run Facebook ads until
iOS 14 hit and you can see some of the online comments uh people were not happy right all the performance dropped you know I was at the agency at the time we were running a lot of Facebook ads efficiency just plummeted so we have to Pivot and so what I've learned in the last two years is LinkedIn ads is too expensive only if you don't have a strategic framework to run it so I'm going to share that framework with you today um so in the next 20 minutes it's going to show you everything you should
do before you spend your first dollar how to actually think about your campaigns uh on LinkedIn ads and then also how to go from 0 to one and then 1 to 100 on LinkedIn ads so before you spend your first dollar nail your ICP right A lot of people start you know spending money without really having a clear sense of their ICP and that's just the best way to burn money so here's a framework I use this is how specific you want to be you can take a photo if you want but I'll give you our example here to you know make it a little more
colorful so we target product and Engineering leaders that's a contact right and non verticalized B2B SAS companies in these regions uh companies of a certain size or a certain funding who don't have a dedicated Integrations engineering team and have less than 30 Integrations and these last two attributes are very very detailed right we're not just talking about we target B2B SAS we're really honing in on who we have product Market fit with um by the way is anyone does this is anyone like this here no yeah all right we should talk after we have a couple customers
here as well um so this ICP once you've crafted it this becomes your framework for your targeting Universe this is is the boundary of who you want to be spending your dollars on right and we'll get back to this later but basically we took that definition split it into account data split into contact data so now that you have your ICP the next question is is LinkedIn ads the right channel for you right it may not be and so here's the list of questions I would ask yourself before you start LinkedIn if you don't have a clear uh idea of your ICP hopefully we just solve that but if you don't don't spend money
yet uh if your ICP does not spend time on LinkedIn don't you know meet them where they are don't spend money on LinkedIn if they don't uh third if you don't have content your ICP will find Value in uh I'll get into this more later but you probably shouldn't spend too much money on LinkedIn if you don't have content uh fourth if you have a very low ACV if you're a plg product where you're trying to drive signups for you know $100 a year probably not you know not a great Channel fit for you and then if you have less than 5K to spend and try to build confidence in the channel I would say probably not worth
running right so if you're like we can only spend $200 you're not going to be able to optimize enough to figure it out all right so once you've said yes or no to all those uh let's talk about data and infrastructure this is what you need again before you start spending your first dollar right now there's a bunch of stuff here I'm not going to spend my time on the first two because you can find a bunch of tutorials online it's very easy just like Basics um you know LinkedIn setup some stuff on the website like how did you hear about us because attribution is a pain uh what I'm going to be focusing on is own data which is
mostly building an account list this is the most important thing if you don't have this don't spend money right and then the post lead operations what do you do with your leads after you get them because they're valuable so account data uh there's a couple ways to get this uh you can be very Scrappy as you on the far right that's how we started uh we paid up workers to help us scrape websites manually that's how we when we were very early that's how we were figuring out hey you know what this is the best way for us to build a highly accurate list to work off of now there's also a lot of off the uh shelf data providers that you're probably all
familiar with like Apollo crunch Spas you can use those um and then if you're starting to spend more money which is what we do um would definitely work with a vendor like good fit or key playay these are data as a service platforms they basically work with you understand your ICP understand like the custom attributes you want to understand to help you score accounts like for us you know it's like do they have an Integrations engineering team or how many Integrations do they have they scrape their websites for us and they enrich all this account data so we can better segment um that's kind of the gold standard I would say but even
starting here is great um and you know with these platforms once you've defined that ICP where going back to the ICP you can now use your ICP to build filters right and this is how you kind of arrive at this account list that you can start using in all your campaigns cool so now we just talked about everything you need to have before you f spend your first dollar and how do you actually go spend it so now in the middle we're going to talk about uh the actual basics of LinkedIn ads right this is like how to think about targeting how to think about campaigns how to think
about creatives um so we're going to start with targeting because doesn't matter what you're creative is you don't know who you're targeting right um simple marketing funnel right the world doesn't NE necessarily work this cleanly at all times people jump steps but this is still the most productive way and the easiest way to think about your audience uh the B biggest segment are people who don't know about you uh or don't care or are not ready to buy right and so uh yeah that's the cold segment engage warm it's like hey you know these are people
who have maybe read some more content been on our blog um but they're not really actively evaluating uh but they're they're aware of who you are hot um are people who have visited like key pages on your website right they may have visited the demo page the pricing page but they just haven't converted um and then kind of I have like this little line saying like here's a key conversion Point uh depending on what your business model is after that is evaluating these are people that are in your sales process these are people who have uh maybe signed up for a free trial right you want to think about your strategy
from this lens and this kind of ties into targeting so when you build your targeting um framework those segments we just put together that builds up the account or company part of your targeting right so for every campaign you need to figure out what roles are we targeting are we targeting product leaders are we targeting marketing leaders right um that's consistent across all campaigns and then in the middle that's where you decide okay for this campaign am I targeting the cold segment the warm segment the hot segment
or maybe even trying to accelerate sales Cycles right you want to make sure that you're you're you're you're thinking about the funnel as you're building your targeting and then last is just Regional this is just very tactical like are we targeting all over the world or are we targeting you know just the US it's pretty straightforward so to give a tactical example this is just one of the many cold campaigns we run um here we target the regions I mentioned earlier in my ICP you know Europe Canada Israel Singapore United States you know um pretty standard stuff in the middle here roles you know we actually split our ICP
so we have campaigns dedicated to product campaigns dedicated to engineering because they care about different things different messaging resonates to each of them so in this campaign specifically as you can see uh we're targeting engineering and then at the bottom we have we call LinkedIn tier 3 that's just how we've scored our accounts we have different tiers this is the tier three accounts and because it's just a list of accounts it's cold right there's no intent here there's no engagement here's just here's a list of companies cool so now we've gone over targeting the framework there with the funnel next is about creatives and
messaging which is actually hyper important too and I've realized this over time more and more uh so here's a formula for how I would think about creatives first is context right this goes back to what we just talked about the funnel helps you understand the context in which this person is seeing your app right if they don't know your brand you have to think about that as you're thinking about what to present to them if they're evaluating you know you they they know your product very well you have to understand okay the context in which this person is seeing my ad is that they've evaluated our product or are actively evaluating our product
right so context is first second is offers So based on this context what do they care about what do I think they care about right so for top of funnel if I'm selling hey like book a demo they're like I don't even know who you are why would I book a demo with you but for someone who's actively engaging you know maybe you want to throw some injection handlers at them right so what do they care about and then last is how do I actually make this topic that they should care about uh interesting enough or you know engaging enough so they'll actually engage with it and read it and and and
click through right so this is the framework for creatives and I like to use this as a reminder none about your product except for maybe a very small percentage who are actively in the buying cycle so um just to kind of split this into the fun and give you a view that way here's some ideation prompts right so on the left I have my cold and my warm audiences and here are some questions to ask yourself right like what is your job to be done um what problems are they facing and remember this is agnostic of your product try to
remove your product as you start to ask these questions and over time figure out okay how does my product maybe or the problem space relate to it but really start from the core like what do these people care about because they don't care about your product so they have to care about something else to engage with you right what questions do they need answers to what do they want to learn right this is where you want to focus um your efforts on in the cold and warm and that's why in slide two or three where I said don't start link diving off content that they care about this is why all right and then in the kind of hot evaluating phases uh now you can start
to really think about okay is it you know they're not convinced that my product is the right solution do they think the problem we solve is not a priority you can start to think ask yourself these questions to inform what you focus your ads on right because they're they're kind of actively buying and so here's just some examples from the left we have our cold ads on the right we have hot and so just to give you example of how we kind of break this apart on the left we're talking about kind of engineering content where Integrations are a small piece of it but it's really just like a very kind of hot
topic that all engineering leaders at SAS companies are thinking about which is like how do we build AI features right into our product um Integrations are part of that but it's it's more about like hey what is the thought leadership that will engage them and people love this stuff as we start to move mid funnel right now we're talking about Integrations we're not talking about our product but we are talking about Integrations why Creations important for your buyers right um and then as you get closer to making decisions like should you build or should you look for a solution and at the end these are the people who are actively evaluating let's retarget the
heck out of them with like case studies objection handlers right and really convince them here's why you should buy or here's why you should convert now once you've gotten some leads the followup is very important leads are very valuable you're spending a lot of money linkedin's ads can be cheaper but it's still not free so you want to make sure you have a really robust follow strategy for all your leads and so here you know again the funnel comes through right you want to think about once I capture my lead where are they coming in from are they coming in from something that's like a book a
demo form or something that's very bottom funnel like a product tour right in that case feed them like just get them on an a calendar don't waste time there if they are downloading content but it's not product content don't just go and say do you want to book a demo right have kind of uh messaging that's related to the content they've shown interest in and so here I call it assets specific sales Fallout we'll give you an example later and then if you're just driving them to cold content hopefully you're not gating it but if you are putting a lead form in front of it don't get sales to go after them you're
wasting your sales team's time and they're going to be pissed off so again think about your follow-up strategy and this is mine so for pretty much everything we've gated we have a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure path right they get their own automated cadences so hopefully that doesn't expose my secrets but um everyone gets like a very personalized Cadence based on the content they read or the tour that they came through or the form that they filled out okay last I have a couple minutes left so I'll try to run through these um
now that we've kind of have the basics we have the infrastructure piece set up let's talk about how do you actually start right how do you spend your first dollar and so where do you start um first retarget right I think that's like the lowest hanging food these are people that have been on your website that have looked at like your pricing page and they're interested they're actively looking to buy they're activ evaluating they just haven't been convinced enough um just get them over the line with uh with with retargeting um this is really
easy to set up and you know you also don't need to create a lot of content you already know what the common objections are you know what the common reasons people don't buy are so you can start creating ads and experimenting here but this audience is small so you can't stay here forever right and so once you scale beyond that um pick one segment so we talked about ICP but an ICP is not a segment your ICP is your Universe right your ICP is made up of many many many segments within it and you know in our case we talk about non-
verticalized B2B SAS as the example but there's sales software that we could sell to there's marketing software we can sell to there's HR software we can sell to as an example those are all individual segments if you break it down you know this is also a pretty big range of company sizes right and so we think about our tiers in terms of okay are they five 50 to 200 employees are they 200 to 500 employees right these are all different ways of cutting the pie remember your ICP is not your uh not your segment it's your universe so pick your best segment look at your sales
data look at where you have the you know fastest sales Cycles where you have the highest win rates and highest conversion rates throughout the funnel and start with your best one where you have the best product Market fit because it's going to deteriorate over time as you go into your kind of longtail segments and so yeah just examples of how you could think about like how we this one ICP and split into your segment start with your best slowly move down the list right and also experiment with different ways of cutting up your ICP and quick note super tactical you're going to see this if you're running it
yourself it's going to be very overwhelming stick with these three um retargeting brand awareness this just means you're going to try to spam them with Impressions right if they're aware you just want to be in front of them top of M all the time uh handling objections reminding them why your product in the problem you solve is important uh for top of funnel stuff get them to the website get them to content that's valuable that way you can then retarget them later on right it's kind of a little bit of a funnel little bit of a cycle here and then um for those who don't have confidence and are like hey you know we spent like $2,000 and we're
driving them to content we're not sure if it's working uh how do I build confidence because it's really about convincing yourself to spend another dollar to keep scaling right you have to have confidence that this is working to some extent um start with lead generation ads these are basically uh you're putting a form in front of the ad they fill it out they get content uh even if it's not you know converting into demos right away if you can see hey look these are exactly the types of people we want to be having conversations with it'll give you confidence that you're hitting the right people on LinkedIn and now it's just about optimizing what content I give
them how do I convert them later on right you're you're you're using this to give yourself like undeniable attribution that these these ICP people are coming through Linkedin and then last is measuring performance because it's very important um don't fall into the attribution trap this is this is a really hard one I you know I struggle with this all the time but everyone's like oh what is the exact cost per lead on LinkedIn the truth is LinkedIn is a um an outbound Channel what do I mean by that people are not looking for your ad
when they're scrolling on LinkedIn right you're feeding it in front of their faces when they're trying to look at you know weird posts by people talking about things on LinkedIn all the time um so you're you're you're kind of uh trying to stop them from scrolling and so they may not be ready to convert right away and in most cases they don't so what we see for example is we have a lot of engagement on on LinkedIn but most people end up coming on a a different device and then they go on book a demo right so you're not you're not going to be able to measure attribution like you would Google as where they're searching
for a solution they convert right away so don't fall into it my tip here um isolate don't change to much when you're trying to run LinkedIn ads on your other channels keep everything steady spend a bit on LinkedIn ads see the overall lift right we see that whenever we spend more on LinkedIn ads or organic and direct also shoot up right and so don't try to get into like the manual tracking of it too much uh just look at overall efficiency cool but then you still have to care about on platform metrics this is kind of these are early indicators of hey are we doing the right things
directionally right so click the rate are people clicking our ads tells you two things one is our audience accurate are we targeting the right people and two if we are targeting the right people is our messaging resonating right that's what this is telling you if this is off then either your messaging is wrong or your targeting is wrong website activity once they click on our ad what are they doing on my website are they leaving right away or are they actually getting value are they spending time is the content good enough right and then last is just some proxy metrics you get like cost per lead cost per conversion again would not be looking at this from an Roi
perspective more to compare performance between different campaigns to say okay this campaign is be a little more efficient again look at overall efficiency when you're trying to decide hey is LinkedIn the right channel for me and then last I got two minutes scaling uh just iterate and test everything we've talked about today keep testing test your segments right there's a bunch of different ways for you to splice and dice uh your ICP second keep iterating on your messaging um your ad creatives in your offers try to figure out you know uh and a lot of this can be learned through like your sales cycle right like what is the messaging that
works the best and resonates with prospects the most in our sales cycle take a lot of these insights on product messaging and feed it into your ad experimentation and like play around with different offers um third keep shipping valuable content for us uh I always talk about like content is the fuel um and the lifeline for our LinkedIn ads without new content it's going to get saturated people are going to be bored of seeing your brand you want to make sure you continue to add value constantly even if they're not ready to buy so that when they're ready to buy you're the first thing they think
about and last is experiment with ad formats there's a bunch of AD formats you can kind of play around with um start with images they're the easiest but yeah you can always continue to experiment with and so in the last three years um we have about 75 campaigns oh sorry 511 campaigns uh and over 2,600 creatives that we've been kind of cycling through and experimenting with and so if nothing else today remember these four things one nail your
